Blog-o-ween 2023: Harlan Ellison

It is getting late in the Blog-o-ween 2023 day, wouldn’t you say, folks? Like long-distance runners, we’ve kept up a pretty fast and — dare I say it? — arrogant pace throughout the first twenty days of this crazy venture. Twenty days without a single kink, knot, stitch, or pulled hammy to slow us down. We’ve got miles behind, but miles yet to go. Now, it’s 21 October, we got ten days until the big day, and today is the first time in this run that I feel like Lilli Von Shtupp...

But, dammit, today’s a big day for me. Today is the day I was especially looking forward to when I started planning this whole month-long journey through spooky fiction. Today, we’re going to look at a few short stories by my personal favorite writer. A man who has more than 1,800 short stories to his name. A writer who has written countless essays and newspaper columns. He was an editor, a movie reviewer, and a television critic, He wrote scripts for shows such as Burke’s Law, The Outer Limits, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and Star Trek.

He also wrote the 1966 movie The Oscar.

No one’s perfect.

A writer with that many credits deserves my fullest attention, wouldn’t you say? So, like Uta Pippig, who battled ischemic colitis for 26.2 miles to win the 1996 Boston Marathon, I will persevere and push through this sleepy feeling to bring you five — that’s right, FIVE! — stories from the one and only Harlan Ellison. Unlike Pippig, I will attempt to do all this without so much blood and diarrhea running down my legs. I can’t promise anything, though.

Let’s go!

“He turned onto his left side in the bed, trying to avoid the wet spot. He propped his hand against his cheek, smiled grimly, and prepared to tell her the truth about why he’d been married and divorced three times...”

Our first story, “All the Birds Come Home to Roost,” is from the 1980 collection Shatterday. It was originally published in the March 1979 issue of Playboy. In it, Michael Kirxby is a man who finds himself being forced to meet all of the women he’s ever had relationships with over again. The thing is, however, Michael Kirxby isn’t a very nice guy. He hasn’t treated the women in his life very well. In fact, he’s the love-’em-and-leave-’em type. And when he leaves ‘em, he doesn’t much care about the damage he leaves behind. As he travels backwards in time, meeting the last woman he was seeing before moving on, and then meeting the woman before her, and the woman before her, he knows that eventually he will get to Cindy. And Cindy...well, you’ll have to read the story to find out what Michael and Cindy’s relationship was like.

“On the night after the day she had stained the louvered window shutters of her new apartment on East 52nd Street, Beth saw a woman slowly and hideously knifed to death in the courtyard of her building. She was one of twenty-six witnesses to the ghoulish scene, and, like them, she did nothing to stop it...”

Next, we have “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” from the 1975 collection Deathbird Stories. It was originally published by Thomas M. Disch in his 1973 anthology Bad Moon Rising: An Anthology of Political Forebodings. Ellison, himself, has admitted to being haunted by the murder of Kitty Genovese outside of her New York City apartment in 1964. The rape and stabbing death of Genovese allegedly happened in view of thirty-eight people, who did nothing to stop it. (This version of the crime has since been debunked.) It was a national news story and used by media outlets as a prime example of what living in the big city does to people: it puts blinders on them and makes them selfish and uncaring.

“The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” begins with a murder in full view of an apartment building. None of the witnesses do anything to stop it. Instead, they stand by and watch the whole thing unfold below them. What causes so many “good” people to do nothing in the face of such evil? Ellison suggests that our cities have become sites of dark energies, places that demand sacrifice...and worshippers. But worshippers of what exactly?

“In the third year of my death, I met Piretta...”

Written in 1959 for The Saint Detective Magazine, “The Time of the Eye” has since gone on to be a part of numerous anthologies and many of Ellisons’s own collections, including Alone Against Tomorrow: Stories of Alienation in Speculative Fiction (1971), From the Land of Fear (1973), and the many editions of The Essential Ellison.

In a hospital known only as “The Place,” a young man recovering from injuries and a breakdown brought on by action he saw in the war meets a beautiful, blind young woman. He and she give their nurses the slip to sit quietly in the garden, alone. He soon recognizes the young woman to be a famous model who disappeared some years before. She was a woman known to be a hedonist, someone looking for the highest, rarest experiences that the world could offer her senses. She became a member of a group known as “The Men of the Eye,” and during a ritual called “The Time of the Eye,” they took her and...well...you’ll just have to read the story for yourself to see what else they took.

“Chris Hudak knew he was in trouble when his computer bit him. Not hard, not the first time. Just a nip. The merest drawing of blood from his index finger...”

Published in the January 1995 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and included in his 1997 collection Slippage: Precariously Poised, Previously Uncollected Stories, the short story “Keyboard” is a quickie. Ellison’s work in the last decades of his life became shorter, sharper, snappier. They cut to the chase, as well as the bone, quickly.

On its face, “Keyboard” is a simple story of technology gone mad, a subject that Ellison had touched upon numerous times throughout his career. Here, a writer finds that his computer needs to feed on more than electricity to work. And the television looks pretty hungry, too.

Last, but certainly not least, we have two stories from Ellison’s 1978 collection Strange Wine. The fifteen tales in this book are described on the jacket as being “from the nightside of the world.” Indeed, they are. Let's start with the story “Killing Bernstein.”

“If God (or Whoever’s in charge) had wanted Dr. Netta Bernstein to continue living, He (or She) wouldn’t have made it so easy for me to kill her...”

Life at MyToy Corporation is a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog business. No one knows that more than Jimmy Duncaster. As Director of Market Research, Duncaster works closely with Dr. Bernstein. Maybe a bit too closely. The day after they spend the night together, Dr. Bernstein acts like she doesn’t know him at all. It’s like he’s a stranger. Then, she proceeds to feed him to the corporate sharks over his Little Miss Goodie Two-Shoes Doll project. Duncaster kills Bernstein in a fit of rage that night, but when he arrives at work the next morning — there she is at her desk! So, he kills her again. And she comes back again. He kills her again. She comes back again. He kills her. She comes back. What’s going on here?

“Beneath the city, there is yet another city: wet and dark and strange; a city of sewers and moist scuttling creatures and running rivers so desperate to be free not even Styx fits them. And in the lost city beneath the city, I found the child...”

Our final story for today is “Croatoan.” A man recklessly impregnates a casual dalliance and calls on friends to give the woman a backstreet abortion. They have done this for him many times before. Too many times. With the job complete and the aborted fetus flushed away, the woman demands that he go after it and bring it back. Soon, the man finds himself in the New York City sewer system and in the company of...let’s just say that what finds him down there in the moist dark corners of the underworld calls him “Daddy.”

One of the reasons I wanted to include so many of Ellison’s stories (I mean, besides the fact that I just love the guy’s writing — believe me, I could have included A LOT more!), is that these aren’t tales of your usual ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. The horrors in much of Ellison’s work don’t come from “out there” but rather from inside the human heart. The monsters in these and other Ellison tales grow out of the heartlessness with which the protagonists treat others and themselves. The lead characters in stories like “Croatoan,” “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” and “All the Birds Come Home to Roost” do not ever want to take responsibility for their own actions. They try to deflect and ignore the issues — whether they are using other people for their own ends or pretending they don’t see the brutality of the world — and they try to make them someone else’s problems. Like in the best EC Comics/Tales from the Crypt tradition (see this previous post for more on the wonderful poetic justice of those stories), however, these characters are confronted by their own callousness and made to atone for it. This atonement is not a pretty thing. Crawling into the sewers at night and finding an ancient civilization beneath the streets is not supposed to be a trip to Funsville, you know?

Harlan Ellison was born in Painesville, Ohio, in 1934. His childhood in this small town outside of Cleveland was fraught with bullying and antisemitism. Leaving at a young age after the death of his father, Ellison rode the rails and worked as a fisherman, a door-to-door salesman, a short-order cook, and a nitroglycerine truck driver in North Carolina, amongst other jobs. He attended Ohio State University for eighteen months before being expelled. After moving to New York City in 1955 to become a writer, Ellison sold over a hundred short stories and articles over the next two years. The man was off and running and didn’t look back.

I can’t do justice to the crazy life that Ellison led. If you want to find out more about the man, then I highly suggest you watch the documentary film Dreams with Sharp Teeth. Even then, you won’t get the full story. To do that, you have to turn to his writings. His non-fiction work is especially eye-opening. Maybe read his two collections of television criticism written form the Los Angeles Free Press from 1968-1970, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat. The Harlan Ellison Hornbook is also collected from weekly columns he wrote for the “Freep,” mostly from 1972-1973.

You should also look for Ellison’s audiobooks for a glimpse into the man’s mind. Whether he’s reading his own stories — like in The Voice from the Edge and Run for the Stars — or the works of others — as in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game or Jule Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (which is a great favorite of mine and my son’s) — you get to hear a man who loves, Loves, LOVES telling stories. He puts on accents, whispers, shouts, cackles wildly, weeps, rushes headlong through this and that paragraph, and takes his sweet-ol’-time tasting every word in a particular sentence so that you come to hear every sense of every word. He always delivers a masterful performance and is worth listening to again and again.

That’s all for today, kiddies. I hope you’ll take a trip to your local library and dig up some books from ol’ Uncle Harlan. Grab anything you can find. You really can’t miss. Crack one of his books open and you’ll find yourself transported into the circuited belly of an insane supercomputer or to a world run strictly on time by the Tick-Tock Man or to a warehouse where the Phantom Sweetener has just pulled the soul of your dead Aunt Babe from a long-forgotten, sit-com laugh track. No matter where you end up, you’ll be sure to have...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!